Hi, my name is Karen, they call me rawfood Karen. I have a Bachelor of Health Science in Nutrition and am a practising Naturopath. In 2006, while studying, I became ill. I had been under a lot of stress, nursing a family member who had been ill, studying, working and volunteering, something had to give and it did.

I had been attending a weight loss clinic. I was concerned that as a naturopath I should walk the talk and look the part. They advised me to eat animal protein at every meal. They said that the weight would be harder to lose if I didn’t. I did indeed lose the weight but I got sick!

I now know from my studies that much of our toxins are stored in our fat cells and that at some stage of our weight loss, they will be released into our system. Unless the intake of plant fibre is sufficient to bind to and remove those toxins, they will circulate through our system and cells, causing acidity and other problems. My symptoms were chronic reflux, overwhelming fatigue and I had pain on every movement. Many of the foods I‘d eaten previously, I could no longer tolerate. Even a cup of green tea made me feel like I had lost the plot!

I went to the doctor to try to get a diagnosis and after many exhausting and expensive tests we both kind of gave up on that one. If the medical profession can’t find a name for it, they can’t help you and I really only wanted a diagnosis to better help myself. Even with the love and support of family, this was a very lonely and frightening time. Nobody really believes you if you can’t give it a name. I felt like I was dying! And one day I just thought to hell with it, I would rather spend the energy I had sorting out my mental and emotional stuff because if I was going to die, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than dying in the wrong headspace. As a naturopath I accepted that everything in the body is related and even that 80% of disease is psychosomatic.

At this point, the only things I could eat were fresh fruit, salads (with sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and sprouts) and at night (before 5pm ), I would eat steamed vegetables and salmon with pumpkin seed oil. That was it, that was all I could eat, along with water and Clivers tea which I drank to help cleanse my lymphatic system. I had never heard of the raw food diet. Though I later discovered on my bookshelf, a little book I had brought fifteen years earlier when I was very overweight, terribly unhappy and not interested in healthy eating at all and certainly never read. It was called Light Eating for Survival by Marcia Madhuri Acciardo with a foreword by Viktoras Kulvinskas.

I was sick enough that I was not able to work but I kept studying as that was something dear to my heart that I wanted to finish. Around that time, we had a lecturer at college and she talked about the raw food diet, which she followed. She talked about how it had helped with her health problems. She used to say, if you eat 80% raw, you get back 80% but if you eat 100% you get 1000% back. I thought those sounded like pretty good odds! I was most of the way there anyway so what did I have to lose? Within two weeks of going 100% raw my energy started to return and all the symptoms left. I was my old self again only better!

Around the time I went raw, I also did a psychoactive therapy three day retreat. I was keen to try every avenue to get myself well. By the time I arrived at the workshop the emotional detox was already kicking in. I was crying most of the way up there and sitting in the group crying from the start and so I was first cab off the rank so to speak. And what did I have to lose, I thought I was dying anyway remember! So everything came out, every little nasty, guilty, sad thing I could think of was regurgitated in one enormous, toxic, foul swoop. Ah, that felt sooo much better! And guess what, people didn’t judge, they said things like, good on you, that was awesome and I hope I’m that brave. Because you see, our stories are all the same! At the end of the weekend, someone remarked that it had been an incredible bunch of people to do the weekend with and I said, but this is everyone, if you scratch the surface, this is everybody you will ever meet!

On the trip home from the weekend I had a suppressed memory recollection and for me it was the final piece of the puzzle. Once you understand all that you are and everything that has been before you can let go and forgive, primarily yourself, then you have real self love and that leads to real love and forgiveness for everybody else ever involved in your life, indeed for humanity. There is almost a genetic emotional patterning in what repeats one generation to the next until we see the bigger picture. In any case, we all choose our birth because of what we have to learn or what we think we have to make up for. It is all very beautiful.

When I found rawfood, I didn’t feel the need to keep studying I just wanted to share my experience on rawfood but I knew I had to finish so that I had the qualifications so people would be more likely to trust what I had to say around diet. When I first went raw I lost a further 16kg in 14 weeks. They say you lose your diseased tissue, then it stabilises, then you regrow healthy tissue. I figured the bottom end of my healthy weight range was 59kg so I decided to not be the least bit concerned until I went below that. But the weight stabilised at 63 kg and then I put a bit back on. I have since corresponded with a young woman who went down to 39kg in curing herself of Crohn’s disease and is now healthy, symptom free and has a baby, though her family were convinced she should be carted off to hospital.

Thing with hospitals is, they are kind of bad for your health. A quadriplegic friend was finally convinced to introduce green juices and smoothies into his diet when he noticed in hospital EVERYBODY was constipated, a combination of poor diet and medication. I had a recent encounter with a woman who had just had major back surgery in a private hospital. The hospital prescribed light diet was orange jelly and packet soup! She had her husband bring her in fresh juice every day. She did not need the morphine pump, she was not crying in pain (unlike the girl 20 years her junior in the next bed who had had the far less serious operation). Who in their right mind thinks a body can heal on a chemical soup of orange jelly and packet soup? Is that not false economy to the nth degree?

Sometimes I wonder whether speaking out as I do will get me into trouble one day. Even at naturopathic college the feeling was that I should not be advocating rawfood over supplementation, that it was somehow risky? How have we come to value synthetic supplementation over nature’s goodness and bounty? Did we not evolve eating good, clean, natural food. Natural food is a difficult thing to even study. It is in constant change. It comes as a perfect synergistic blend of nutrients, one helping the uptake of the other. It should be obvious to all that our health has seriously deteriorated since we started processing and refining our foods?

There is a lot of money and profits involved in our “healthcare industry” not to mention our meat and dairy industry and processed food industry. I realise what I am saying is poking a stick at all of that. But the trouble is I don’t scare anymore. In my life, I have faced losing my mother, she left without warning when I was about eleven. Potentially losing everything I owned and realising it doesn’t matter at all. Potentially losing my daughter but needing to shoulder her care anyway because they had already nearly killed her with medication and neglect. I had faced the prospect of my own death and decided that it was more important what head and heart space I died in than whether I kept living or not. What do I have left to be scared of?

I now know that I can be happy anywhere, that there is a whole universe inside to entertain me. I’m sure my friends would bring me rawfood in prison. In any case, I would have everyone converted in no time, prisoners and guards alike. It would be a haven of peace and a model community. People would want in, not out. In fact I think there’s been a study done............................... the first rawfood martyr? All for the greater good!

Rawfood Karen

“There are worse things than being blind, like a lack of vision” Helen Keller

You could say “There are worse things than being locked up,
like never being free!” Rawfood Karen

“You see things and you say “Why?”
But I dream things that never were and say “Why not?”
George Bernard Shaw